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The handgun found next to William Spengler Jr. after he fatally shot two firefighters on Christmas Eve was manufactured by Smith & Wesson and sold in 1973 to a firearms dealer in Tennessee.

Later, that dealer shut down. Its records, apparently destroyed, are nowhere to be found.

Through what they describe as a stroke of luck, federal agents have located someone else who once had possession of the .38-caliber revolver. Now, they are trying to determine how the gun moved from there to Spengler.

The investigation continues, largely because it would be a crime if someone gave or sold the gun to Spengler. Spengler, a felon who served 17 years in prison for bludgeoning his grandmother to death with a hammer, could not legally own a firearm.

“We’re committed to finding out how exactly those guns got to him,” said Scott Heagney, who heads the Rochester region office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF.

The investigation into how Spengler obtained the pistol — one of three firearms found with him after he killed himself on Dec. 24 — bears out the difficulties federal agents have tracking guns used in crimes.

In an era of rampant technology, federal agents find themselves hamstrung by limitations on gun registration information. Their investigative techniques harken to a past era, when they sometimes have to sift through thousands of paper records in search of information about a particular firearm.

“Currently, all we can do is trace the gun back to the original purchaser of record,” Heagney said.

Spengler used the handgun to kill himself, police say. Also found next to him were a shotgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the latter used to kill volunteer firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka.

The handgun could have belonged to Spengler’s sister, Cheryl. She has been missing, and remains found in Spengler’s destroyed home at 191 Lake Road in Webster are suspected to be her.

Officials are still working to identify the remains.

For now, however, authorities know little about the gun other than that its pathway to New York and William Spengler Jr. begins in the South.

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Trail grows cold

According to ATF Special Agent Sean Martineck, the investigation into the handgun used by Spengler could well have started and finished with the information about the Tennessee dealer that had possession of the gun after Smith & Wesson.

That operation, which authorities would not identify, closed down and did not forward its records to ATF. That meant that there was not a document detailing who bought the gun — assuming anyone did — from the Tennessee federal firearms licensed dealer, commonly known as an FFL.

When a licensed dealer shuts down, it is supposed to send its records to an ATF facility in West Virginia. The Tennessee operation did not, and, according to ATF officials, the records cannot be found.

“Most of the time, this is how it ends,” Martineck said.

Even were the records available, the task for investigators would be daunting. The West Virginia facility receives an average of 1.2 million business records a month shipped in boxes from firearms dealers that are closing, according to ATF.

There, authorities pore through the millions of records by hand to help police track guns used in crimes. ATF has been prohibited by law from digitizing the records, since federal statutes forbid creation of a gun registry.

Blocked from recording transaction records electronically, ATF workers take photographs of sale forms and record them on microfiche.

This precludes the staff from using a computerized search mechanism to scan through records. Instead, they search through the microfiche by hand, often for hours or even days on end, in hopes the information they want is there.

Gun-rights supporters have long contended that a registry is an imposition on firearms dealers and law-abiding citizens.

Chris Edes, who chairs Monroe County’s chapter of Shooters Committee on Political Education, or S.C.O.P.E., said that background checks make sense to keep guns out of the hands of criminals or the mentally ill

Gun tracing, however, does not typically deter gun crimes, he said.

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“Tracing guns back after a crime has already been committed is not useful in preventing future crimes,” Edes said in an email. “Guns will always be available on the black market because criminals ignore the law.”

Shoe-leather tactics

On Dec. 24, ATF agents quickly chased down the point of sale for the shotgun and Bushmaster AR-15 found with Spengler.

Those guns were sold in June 2010 at the Gander Mountain store in Henrietta to a Greece woman, Dawn Nguyen, court papers allege.

Nguyen is now accused in state and federal court of lying on an ATF form in which she claimed the guns were for her personal use. Authorities allege that she bought the guns for Spengler, who was a neighbor on Lake Road where Nguyen then lived.

Following the trail of the handgun has been much more arduous.

Along that route, the gun may have been sold multiple times, passed on from one person to a relative, or even stolen. It may have gone through a couple of owners, or a dozen or more.

With records at a minimum to assist them, ATF agents rely on shoe-leather tactics, hoping they can find the person who had the gun before Spengler.

ATF officials say that more specific information — or any information, in many cases — about gun sales could help them combat the trafficking of firearms. The lack of records connected to the handgun Spengler used shows just how laborious their task can be, they say.

Why, ATF’s Heagney asks, must citizens record any transfer or sale of their vehicles but not of their guns?